I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll have the opportunity to continue collaborating with Eric Fosler-Lussier, Douglas Danforth, William Schuler, Evan Jaffe and others here on question-answering dialogue systems (e.g. with virtual patients) thanks to new NSF funding. The idea is to use paraphrasing to semi-automatically expand the set of known question variants in order to enhance the robustness of interpretation and enable more accurate speech recognition via discriminative training techniques.

We’ve received NSF funding for our workshop on Uphill Battles in Language Technology! Check out the amazing line-up of invited speakers.

The manuscript of our article investigating whether dependency locality predicts syntactic choices in written English even with strong surprisal-based controls, to appear in Cognition, is now online. (Spoiler: yes it does, mostly, except where discourse factors may be playing a crucial role.) The article itself is also available for a limited time.

Our paper on generating disambiguating paraphrases of structurally ambiguous sentences, to appear in the Tenth Linguistic Annotation Workshop at ACL 2016, is now on-line.

Ajda Gokcen recently presented a poster at LREC 2016 for our paper on a word-aligned corpus of virtual patient dialogues.

I presented a talk on motivation for and initial lessons lessons learned from implementing a first prototype of Dynamic Continuized CCG at the Midwest Speech and Language Days meeting held in Bloomington.

Delighted to have participated in the RefNet Round Table Event this past weekend in Aberdeen, Scotland. Quite the crowd!

Our paper on inducing clause-combining rules (for both aggregation and discourse connective insertion) using the SPaRKy Restaurant Corpus as a test case, to appear at ENLG-15, is now up.

This July and August I’ll be visiting the Department of Computational Linguistics & Phonetics at Saarland University as an Erasmus Mundus visiting scholar, giving a talk in their LangSci Colloquium Series on ambiguity avoidance in natural language generation and its relation to locality effects in human language production.

Ethan Hill and Manjuan Duan presented a poster on our work-in-progress on generating disambiguating paraphrases for crowd-sourced judgments of meaning at the 2015 Midwest Speech Language Days meeting held at TTI-Chicago.